Sean "Cheeks" Galloway on Chiustream

Watched this interview with Cheeks. More and more I think I should try to get into animation. Seems like every artist interview I hear, they all say that at one point or another they got a job in animation.
http://chiustream.blogspot.com/2009/12/sean-cheeks-galloway-interview-by-bobby.html
I think listening to interviews with artists is astoundingly helpful. I tell people to listen to Sidebar all the time. After listening to all of them over the summer, it helped me figure out some hangups in my work and process. Additionally, you can listen to them while you're working, which is always a plus.

Secret Shoes

So my secret project came out. They're custom shoes for Artsprojekt. You can see them here.


I had to keep this under wraps because it's a new collaboration between Zazzle and Keds. They had womans Keds before, but now they have mens ProKeds. I got a pair to customize the old fashioned way, and I had to take a lot of photographs of the process to use in a video that goes along with the launch. I wasn't in love with the colors after painting the shoes and wearing them, they looked too loud, so when I did the painting I went for a more subtle palette. I'm happy with the way they came out. The shoes themselves can be customized in many different ways. This was just the setup I thought looked the best, but you can change all the different rubber parts, the stitching, the laces, etc.

Shoes are one of the only things I don't like illustrations on, which made this an interesting challenge. I typically wear simple shoes. I think it's easy for shoes to look tacky with drawings on them, like Ed Hardy territory. I had to come up with a way to avoid that at all costs. I wanted more of an illustrated design then my illustrations applied to a shoe. I suppose the difference is you want the drawings to be secondary to the design of the shoe, instead of overpowering it. I hope some folks buy these, I get a little cut of each pair sold, so uhhh...tell your friends :)

Featured today on onethingandanother.com

A really fantastic illustrator named Matt Taylor posted my work on this site today. I recently discovered his work through his twitter and I'm really into it. I especially like his film posters and book covers.

I've found a pretty interesting community of artists to talk with via twitter. It's nice to meet new talented artists, even if it's only through the internet.

Working on skateboard sketches today, but I don't have too much to show for now. I suppose my ideas are forming.

Skate deck

I'm starting a skate deck project today. I got an email from the Montana Skatepark Association a few weeks ago asking me if I'd contribute to their art show/auction to raise money for skateparks. I applied, was accepted, and got a deck in the mail a little while later. If you didn't see, I posted a link on my Facebook fan page, and at least one other person was accepted into the show as well. Cool stuff! I haven't painted a deck since I was a sophomore (I think?) in college. It's been a while, and I'm looking forward to making another one. It's not due for a while, but I like to be ahead of schedule, and it's still my most pressing deadline.

More info: http://www.montanaskatepark.org/ondeck/index.php

Shirt Designs

Today I worked on these shirt designs. The final version can be seen and purchased from my store here:www.zazzle.com/jeremyforson/tshirts. I was getting enough requests to make them into shirts that I obliged.

I posted a photo of the large drawings I made to make these shirts. I blew up the small drawings from my recent mash-up piece, and traced them with a sharpie. These are much larger than the maximum printing surface for these digitally made shirts, but I wanted them to shrink down and look sharp. I could have taken the original drawings and put them through a "Live Trace" in Adobe Illustrator, but I really don't like the way vector tracings look. So much so, in fact, that I'd rather redraw them and spend hours cleaning them up. I doubt that anybody else would care...at all...but it bothers me. I also tried redrawing them in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet, but I stopped pretty quickly. I'm still not comfortable with a tablet and stylus; I find them frustrating and slow. I used the tablet to fill in the blacks, and for knocking out large areas of flat color and such I think they are great, but drawing lines kills me.

I'm a little embarrassed about the state of my tracing paper, which I had spilled some inky water on years ago, and you can see how it seeped into the side of the pad. I don't use it that often.

In other news:
My story is up at sixwordtales.com and the sixwordtales facebook page. Check those out. I like Stiles' 6 words stories a lot, they get my mind spinning.

Forrest

I did this painting today as part of my secret project. I'm not breaking any rules by showing this, so don't worry.

2/20/10

Today I was painting stuff for a project I have to keep under wraps. These are annoying because I like showing what I'm working on, and often what I make under such situations never see the light of day, or they do, but after such a long time that you don't care about them anymore. This one, luckily, should be shown at the end of the month.

In the mean time, I thought I'd share this little texture image I used yesterday to complete the sixwordtales.com illustration. I've been haunting design related sites lately, and I'm finding the cross-pollination fruitful. I read this tutorial on blog.spoongraphics.co.uk, and thought I'd give it a try. I didn't really learn anything new about Photoshop, but I did learn a different way to use it and think about layering and light. Basically the first thing this tutorial calls for is a stock image of smoke, which I cannot afford and probably wouldn't buy anyway; I'm more of a hands on/DIY type of artist, and I like the control it affords me. I have a luxury that a lot of graphic designers don't, which is a wealth of art materials and old paper, and a place to get messy if I need to. Usually GD pros or production artists are at a desk all day and don't have the option of making their own textures, so they rely on stock images.

This is a wet-on-wet ink wash, sprinkled with some salt for the white spots. I actually have a lot of textures I've made over the years for use in digital artwork. Spray-paint, spatters, ink washes, all kinds of papers, wood grains, etc. They're always good to have on-hand.